Booker Prize 2025: ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ is a mapping of displacement and desire

If Kiran Desai’s new novel were a mansion, it would be a vast estate with multiple wings built in different styles, full of interconnected rooms and hidden passages.

From one room comes the voices of disputatious family members; from another wafts the sour smell of discord between lovers; yet another space is filled with the questions of characters navigating the fraught geography between East and West. Some corners are haunted by the ghosts of the past, and all over can be heard the quiet echoes of its inhabitants’ solitude.

‘A vivid and continuous dream’

Given this sprawl, the question arises: what holds the novel together? Spanning nearly 700 pages, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny blends a marriage plot and a trauma-and-recovery arc with immigrant and postcolonial shadings, the constraints of class and gender, and even a supernatural thread involving a ghostly talisman. Its social realist foundation is leavened by moments of lightness, and deepened by episodes of impressionistic despair.

One answer to what makes the novel cohere is the psychological depth with which each character is rendered, often caught between belonging and becoming. It’s a tension that will be familiar to readers of the author’s earlier The Inheritance of Loss. Delving into her characters’ hopes, dreams, and, crucially, their solitudes, Desai...

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